ABSTRACT
This article summarises the results of fieldwork we conducted in Cape Town, South Africa in July-September, 1999 for our M.A. thesis. 1 The project dealt with multilingualism in education, using theories from sociolinguistics (Cooper, 1989; Fishman, 1971; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995, 1998, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 1994) and sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Bulhan, 1985). The background was the changes in the South African Constitution of 1996 which recognises eleven official languages; only English and Afrikaans were the official languages previously.
